How to do things with translation. Jean-Paul Marat’s translation of Newton’s Optics (1787)

There has been an increasing interest, in translation studies, in the figure of the translator and the question of “agency” in the work of translators (see, for example, Milton and Bandia 2009). In translation history, however, many of those who translate are not first and foremost translators and their translations are often the result of wider cultural, historical or political strategies (Burke 2005; Pym 2009). To understand fully a translation, then, it is necessary to look at the text and paratext (Batchelor 2018) but also at the “extra-textual” element of context (Munday 2014). Jean-Paul Marat’s translation of Isaac Newton’s Optics (1787), for example, must be contextualised within a framework of his attempts at recognition as a scientist and in the light of his future activity as a revolutionary journalist (Gillispie 1980; Conner 1998). The translation was an attempt to legitimate his own scientific competence by means of delegitimizing, through a process of “negative filiation” (Lefevere 1998), the standard eighteenth-century translation of Pierre Coste (1722). This entables us also to understand Marat’s translation strategy: to open the text to younger readers through a “free” translation. Marat’s translation can thus be understood as responding to personal scientific and political objectives.